In another of his speeches, Stalin called the Soviet people "little screws" in a great machine.104 Everyone knows about screws; they can be screwed in or out at will, and sometimes when treated roughly their heads fly off. The day after Stalin's speech members of the staff of one of the laboratories at the Aerodynamics Institute in Moscow lined up in the hallways and marched down the halls chanting, "We are little screws; we are nuts and bolts."
Lysenko, Lysenkoism, and Soviet Science
One of the most striking indications of the crisis of the Soviet system under Stalin was Lysenkoism.
The agrobiologist Trofim Lysenko successfully caught Stalin's attention by a very simple method. With the aim of winning an important position in science, he made a speech at the second congress of collective farmers with exemplary work records in February 1935, in which he asserted that while in the countryside the kulaks were fighting the Soviet government, in the city, the "kulaks of science" were doing the same. Stalin was the first to applaud, calling out, "Bravo, Comrade Lysenko. Bravo." This was the beginning of Lysenko's rise. Soon he became president of the Lenin Ail-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences and used his position to drive out the true geneticists, his scientific adversaries, and even saw to it that some were imprisoned. In 1940 the noted Russian botanist and geneticist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was arrested. He died in prison in 1943. Other leading scientists in the fields of biology and agronomy were arrested.105 Lysenko's name is linked with a general social phenomenon, "Lysen- koism," similar to the Rasputin phenomenon in tsarist Russia. Rasputin promised the tsarina the salvation of Orthodox Russia. Lysenko promised the Central Committee, and Comrade Stalin personally, the creation, in a short time, of an abundance of agricultural products. Both Stalin and the Romanov family had hoped for a miracle, but the miracle Stalin and the Central Committee expected was "scientifically based."
Unlimited possibilities were made available to Lysenko in his effort to organize abundance, including the moral and physical right to destroy his opponents. The destruction of agrobiology and of geneticists and biologists, which had begun on the eve of the war, was started with renewed vigor soon after the war was over.
In the summer of 1948 Lysenko called for a public debate with his opponents, who supported the theory of heredity in the origin of species. They accepted the challenge, not even suspecting that Lysenko's report to the August 1948 session of the Lenin АН-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences had been approved beforehand by the Central Committee. Lysenko's basic argument had been concealed until a convenient moment arose. The concluding act in the play came when the geneticists expressed themselves publicly, whereupon Lysenko told them that the Central Committee had approved his theory, which denied the existence of genes and the theory of heredity. After Lysenko's acknowledgment, the geneticists, who were defending the right to have more than one scientific theory, again asked for the floor in order to announce their "repentence."106
The August 1948 session of the academy gave the signal for repressive measures against geneticists. As a result, all scientific work in the field was halted, and hundreds of genuine researchers and experimental agronomists lost their jobs. Lysenko's pseudo-science became established throughout the country, dealing Soviet agriculture yet another blow after collectivization and the war. Even today the Soviet economy has not completely overcome these three catastrophes.
The August 1948 session was also the point of departure for a party offensive in the ideological field. The philosopher Prezent became Lysenko's closest assistant; he was assigned the task of giving a philosophical explanation for the new method. The session was presented to other fields as an example of the defense of Marxism-Leninism.
Genetics was effectively banned throughout the Soviet Union. Professor Nuzhdin, one of Lysenko's helpers, wrote shortly after the conclusion of the academy's session that "Mendelism-Morganism has been condemned. It has no place in Soviet science."107 Nevertheless, in spite of harsh repression, some centers of genetics were able to survive. For example, Academician N. N. Semenov, director of the Institute of Chemical Physics of the USSR Academy of Sciences and a future Nobel laureate, put a laboratory at the disposal of Professor Rapoport, a noted geneticist, without requiring any detailed reports on the nature of his research.
But Lysenkoism was not limited to the rise of Lysenko and his cronies to key positions in science and thereby in the Soviet bureaucracy. It also expressed the party's fundamental policy in regard to science. Like a cancer, Lysenkoism rapidly spread and metastasized.
In the summer of 1950 a joint session of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences announced that Academician К. M. Bykov and his disciples were the sole defenders of Pavlov's physiological theories. All other schools were declared hostile, and their activities came to an end. Bykov was well liked in the party because of his servility, the positions he had taken in favor of Russian science and in opposition to any links with foreign science. Almost all Soviet biologists who had gained any recognition were declared apostates between 1948 and 1950: Academicians I. I. Shmalgauzen, A. R. Zhebrak, P. M. Zhukovsky. N. P. Dubinin, L. A. Orbeli and his school, and A. D. Speransky and his students. The least serious accusation was brought against Professor Anokhin—carelessness in methodology.108
The main targets of these campaigns were Jewish scientists, for example, Academician Lina Shtern, a biologist, and her students, who were denounced for "the perfidious Zionist character" of their school. The physicist D. Biryukov wrote in Culture and Life that "the rotten methodology of this 'school' was supported by the arrant cosmopolitanism which had come to flourish within it."109 The school of Georgian Academician I. Beritashvili was declared idealist and "openly hostile to the doctrines of Pavlov."110 The publishers responsible for the appearance of a translation of What's Life from the Standpoint of Physics, by the famous Austrian scientist E. Schrodinger, were also dragged through the mud.111
The highpoint in the campaign to claim priority for Russian over Western science was a session of the USSR Academy of Sciences held in Leningrad January 5—10, 1949, and dedicated to the two hundred twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences. In his introductory remarks the president of the academy, S. I. Vavilov (the brother of Lysenko's victim), stressed the need for a struggle to affirm Russian science's primacy in discoveries. Among the claims to "firsts" advanced during the campaign of the years 1946—1950 were inventions in the fields of radio, electric lighting, the electric transformer, electrical transmission with direct and alternating current, electric-powered and diesel- powered ships, the airplane, the parachute, and the stratoplane. The discovery of the law of conservation of energy was attributed to Lomonosov. These are but a few examples of the claim, some of them so absurd that they inspired satirical sayings: "Soviet watches are the fastest in the world" and "Russia is the elephant's natural habitat."
The 1949 Academy of Sciences session in Leningrad marked a deliberate break with Western science. Three foreign members of the Academy were removed—the British scientist Dale, an honorary full member, and the American Muller and the Norwegian Brock, who were corresponding members. It is true that the first two had already announced their resignation from the Academy to protest the persecution of scientists in the USSR. Brock was expelled because of his articles on the situation of science in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.112